Everyday you have to navigate a toxic nutritional landscape. You have to hunt and gather in a food desert. You have to survive the American supermarket and dodge the dangers of industrial food. The good news is that if you follow ten simple rules you can eat safely for life.
Think of them as shortcuts or tricks to use when shopping or eating. If you just do these things and nothing else, you will automatically be eating real, fresh food that will prevent, treat and even reverse most of the chronic diseases that drain our energy, stress our families and deplete our economy. You dont even have to understand anything about nutrition. Just follow these goof proof rules for getting healthy, losing weight and feeling great.
1. Ideally have only food without labels in your kitchen or foods that dont come in a box, a package, or a can. There are labeled foods that are great, like sardines, artichoke hearts, or roasted red peppers, but you have to be very smart in reading the labels. There are two things to look for: the ingredient list and the nutrition facts. Check out my special report on How to Read Labels for more information.
Where is the primary ingredient on the list? If the real food is at the end of the list and the sugar or salt is at the beginning, beware. The most abundant ingredient is listed first and the others are listed in descending order by weight. Be conscious, too, of ingredients that may not be on the list; some ingredients may be exempt from labels. This is often true if the food is in a very small package, if it has been prepared in the store, or if it has been made by a small manufacturer. Beware of these foods.
2. If a food has a label it should have fewer than five ingredients. If it has more than five ingredients, throw it out. Also beware of food with health claims on the label. They are usually bad for you think sports beverages. I recently saw a bag of deep-fried potato chips with the health claims gluten-free, organic, no artificial ingredients, no sugar and with fewer than 5 ingredients listed. Sounds great, right? But remember, cola is 100 percent fat-free and that doesnt make it a health food.
3. If sugar (by any name, including organic cane juice, honey, agave, maple syrup, cane syrup, or molasses) is on the label, throw it out. There may be up to 33 teaspoons of sugar in the average bottle of ketchup. Same goes for white rice and white flour, which act just like sugar in the body. If you have diabesity the spectrum of metabolic imbalances starting with just a little belly fat, leading all the way to diabetes you cant easily handle any flour, even whole-grain. Throw it out.
4. Throw out any food with high-fructose corn syrup on the label. It is a super sweet liquid sugar that takes no energy for the body to process. Some high-fructose corn syrup also contains mercury as a by-product of the manufacturing process. Many liquid calories, such as sodas, juices, and sports drinks, contain this metabolic poison. It always signals low quality or processed food.
5. Throw out any food with the word hydrogenated on the label. This is an indicator of trans fats, vegetable oils converted through a chemical process into margarine or shortening. They are good for keeping cookies on the shelf for long periods of time without going stale, but these fats have been proven to cause heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. New York City and most European counties have banned trans fats, and you should, too.
6. Throw out any highly refined cooking oils such as corn, soy, etc. (I will explain which oils to buy in Week 1 of the program in my book The Blood Sugar Solution). Also avoid toxic fats and fried foods.
7. Throw out any food with ingredients you cant recognize, pronounce, or that are in Latin.
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10 rules to eat safely for life
